Figures revealed this week show that last year, Primary Care centres attended almost 50 million consultations, 8.6 million external consultations, more than 2 million emergencies, almost 400,000 admissions, more than 26,700 deliveries and nearly 309,000 surgeries.
These are some of the data recorded in the 2021 Management Report Advance of the Ministry of Universal Health and Public Health, the year in which the budget of this department (7,5 billion euro) increased by 11% compared to 2020 and accounted for 39.54% of the Generalitat’s budget.
In this sense, the regional Minister of Health, Miguel Mínguez, highlighted that the activity “has been extraordinarily stressed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the strong impact of the health crisis, the healthcare network and its professionals have once again demonstrated their extraordinary capacity to respond to the pressure to which they have been subjected, especially in the toughest moments, as well as to plan and execute a vaccination campaign that has been exemplary”.
Specifically, the assistance activity in Primary Care, the number of consultations in Health Centres and Auxiliary Clinics of the Valencian Community for Family and Community Medicine, Paediatrics, Nursing and Midwives amounts to a total of 49,051,504 consultations attended. 96.89% of the consultations have been made by telephone, by video call or in person at the health centre. On the other hand, home consultations have represented 3.11% of the total consultations attended.
Specifically, in 2021 the total number of consultations in Family and Community Medicine (MFC) amounts to 22,949,635, while that of Paediatric consultations is 3,944,143.
In Specialised Attention, in the past year more than 8.6 million External Consultations were attended. Specifically, last year 3,313,989 first queries and 5,311,095 successive queries were attended.
Regarding Mental Health consultations, 1,239,580 were registered in 2021 and hospital admissions amounted to 399,184, of which 26.2% were scheduled and 73.77% urgent.
Likewise, a total of 26,725 deliveries and 27,113 live new-borns were registered. Of the total deliveries, 20,301 were vaginal and 6,424 caesarean sections.
As for surgical interventions, 308,690 operations were performed. Of these, 85.41% were scheduled and the rest urgent.
The hospitals attended 2,066,820 emergencies (daily average 5,662 emergencies), of which 13.51% required admission.
Since the vaccination campaign against COVID-19 began in the Valencian Community on December 27, 2020, in 2021 the complete immunisation schedule was administered to 4,242,773 people and a total of 9,433,334 doses were inoculated.
By laboratories, 6.6 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech were administered (70.7% of the total); 1.5 from Moderna-Lonza (16.3%); one million from AstraZeneca (10.6%) and more than 221,000 doses of the Janssen vaccine (2.4%).
For the newly appointed head of the Health Department, “in the Valencian Community we have extraordinary teams of professionals who spent hours and hours vaccinating in order to protect the entire population who understood that the best antidote to COVID-19 was the vaccine.”
“We can speak of success thanks to the sum of efforts, that of the professionals, the vaccination teams, who were recognised with the high distinction of the Generalitat, and that of the citizens, who understood that this challenge was collective, it was everyone’s challenge”, the minister continued.
The Ministry followed a strategy that consisted of prioritising the protection of the most vulnerable groups, starting with the elderly and the groups at greatest risk, as well as always respecting vaccination by age groups.
In this sense, it should be noted that the Valencian Community is the one that reaches the highest vaccination coverage in all age groups. Thanks to all this, “we can say that the Valencian Community is above the average for the rest of Spain in coverage of the vaccinated population,” added Miguel Mínguez.
In 2021, the activity of organ and tissue donation and transplantation in the hospitals of the Valencian Community also stands out, which has increased during the past year despite the difficulties related to the pandemic. Specifically, 254 people donated their organs and 516 transplants were performed.
This has been possible thanks to the fact that during 2021, 86.4% of Valencian families said yes to donation – a percentage higher than the national average, which stands at 83% – and to the great work carried out by the professionals despite the pandemic.
The donation rate stood at 50.3 donors per million population (pmp) compared to the 2020 rate, set at 39 pmp, and above the national average, which stood at 40.2 pmp.
